Page 2's "Critical Mass" is a weekly survey of what's happening at the busy intersection of sports and pop culture.

Certain things are harder now that my wife and I have a baby girl. We don't see our friends as much we used to. We can't seem to make it to the grocery store on a regular basis. Doing any laundry other than the baby's laundry is pretty much impossible. Bills are paid late or not at all, the car is a filthy mess, houseplants are dying and in every room there are half-dozen unholy stacks of paper, books, magazines, CDs, stray socks and dirty plates, all teetering on the brink of collapse.

	Since baby Tess arrived, Eric Neel has a lot less time for books, movies and ballgames.

Part of it is that we have no time. When we aren't working, we're all about diaper changes, clothes changes, baths, walks and narrowly averted sharp-object-in-the-mouth disasters. Since the baby started eating solid foods (not so much eating as playing with) and crawling (it's actually more scooching and lunging so far, but the girl does, miraculously and quickly, get around), it seems like every waking minute is spent cleaning things up and battening things down.

Most weeks we strike a good balance between work and baby time, but sometimes her needs push everything else to the edges. When that happens, as it did this week when she was teething and had a cold, and was waking up every 90 minutes all night, I sometimes miss out on things: movies, albums, books, even sporting events.

It pains me to admit this. I've always thought of myself as a culture hound and, for as long as I can remember, I have tried to watch even the most obscure, barely relevant games in each and every sport. I build friendships on this stuff. I count on being able to compare notes with buddies about particular scenes, songs or plays. This week, I was the square on the outside looking in. I was looking to bond with other young dads over what we didn't see -- You missed that? Me too, fell asleep six pitches into the first. Where once I kept a comprehensive mental list of what I'd seen, read and heard, now I had a fragmentary record of things I kinda-sorta-meant-to, wish-I-had-the-chance-to catch.

I wanted to play catch-up and read the Lance Armstrong profile that ran in the New Yorker last month, but after looking through the piles of disorganized junk in my office, I came up empty. I did find one with a David Remnick piece on Lennox Lewis which looked good, but I didn't read that either.

Got 12 pages into John McEnroe's new autobiography before falling asleep Thursday night. I also carried around for a couple of days, but didn't actually crack the spine of, Bill Scheft's new comic sports novel "The Ringer."

I rented "Royal Tenenbaums," because I heard it had a bit of a tennis angle, kept it four days late, racking up a nice $8 fine, never watched it. Returned "Royal" and rented "Mean Machine," the British soccer remake of "The Longest Yard," which is staring at me right this second and looking an awful lot like another $8 fine.

I missed Rich Beem and Tiger at the PGA. I did, however, manage to see David Duval and Phil Mickelson (both of whom were way, way over par) play some of the early holes Sunday morning.

I saw the third inning of a Braves-Giants game. I think it was Tuesday. Jeff Kent hit a three-run home run off Greg Maddux. I wanted to call my friend Jeff to ask him if he'd seen it -- it was one of only seven off Maddux so far this year -- but he has an 18-month-old girl, so I figured he had missed it. Then J.T. Snow came to bat, hitting about .240, and the Giants' announcer Jon Miller said, "J.T. Snow is off to an excruciatingly slow start this year" -- my daughter was climbing all over the couch at this point; I've got one eye on her, one on the set -- and it just cracked me up. It's mid-August and Miller is talking about Snow's "slow start." Brilliant. A perfect blend of hard truth and home cooking, critique with a hint of hope.

I started imagining a whole column on the poetic genius and killing kindness of these kinds of phrases, phrases like Bob Uecker's "juuuuust a bit outside." Then the baby fell face first into the cushions and let out a frustrated little cry, and I turned off the game and picked her up and lost my train of thought on the column idea (until now).

I caught a little bit of the Pennsylvania-New York Little League World Series game. Saw some giant kid named Alibay Barkley. Bath time for baby. Game over for me.

Didn't see "Blue Crush," missed "Monday Night Football," saw 10 minutes of HBO's "Hard Knocks" with the Dallas Cowboys (in which some poor mug who rehabbed all last year tore his knee up again and is probably done for), and printed out but didn't get around to reading an L.A. Times article on the virtues of minor-league baseball.

I could list a dozen others. You get the idea.

I'm telling you all this because I was feeling kind of strung out and put-upon by all the missing I was doing this week. I just wanted to sit down and watch a game, any game, straight through. I had a tremendous desire to read something from start to finish. I wanted to go to the theater and sit in the cool dark and watch a surfing movie.

I'm telling you this because it felt like parenting was cramping my style.

I'm telling you this because I'm a fool.

I'm telling you because what I really want to tell you about is yesterday afternoon, on the grass on a hill, with my daughter.

I set her down with her feet pointed toward the wind and sat down behind her, watching the curls in her hair blow back. She picked at the grass a minute, holding blades up close to her face, and bounced her legs. Then she took a deep breath and let it out with a sound I don't know how to describe -- it wasn't a coo or a gurgle, it wasn't a sigh, it was some great, bright blue noise. I'd never heard her make it before, and I've never heard anything like it from anyone else. It was just hers.

Then the wind kicked up, and she lifted her arms over her head, and the last sweet breath of that sound burst into a laugh. She giggled and waved, and she turned her head to look at me over her shoulder. I looked at her and laughed along with her. And I thought, yeah, certain things are harder now, but certain things are a whole lot easier too. Laughing is easier, this easy feeling is easier. And I leaned forward to whisper in her ear, to tell her what I figure she was telling me: "There's time, there's plenty of time."

Eric Neel reviews sports culture in his "Critical Mass" column, which will appear every Wednesday on Page 2. You can e-mail him at eneel@cox.net.